I had one of my sons friends over yesterday, we had ‘dressed’ up the house a bit with a spiders web, skeleton, couple of big pumpkins on the gate posts and had loads of trick or treaters, we used 3 large tubs of sweets.

My son and his friend really enjoyed handing scaring the trick or treaters and handing thout sweets out but his friends parents had said they don’t ‘celebrate’ Halloween so can I not take him trick or treating, my son had said the same....

I don’t get it, I’m not celebrating the day of the dead, it’s a bit like Christmas, for most people it’s a bit of fun with a long history that hardly anyone really understands.

Next year I’m gonna twist his arm to get dressed up, have a Halloween party and maybe sacrifice a goat in the garden.

Traditionally all holidays were religious, being holy days - and the greatest danger to introduction of Protestantism in England was the efforts by the most determined Protestants to end holy days (though the genius of Elizabeth's religious settlement is that the Church of England is not, strictly speaking, a reformed church in the way that that would be understood more generally, unlike the Calvinist Scottish Established Church).

Catholic forms of worship (if not, necessarily Catholicism itself) remained stubbornly strong in many areas, at least until the Wesleyan revival.